Twenty-Six

The lamp posts lining the highway so easily blur into a streak of light like film failing to capture image: milk blooming under black coffee turning into the feel of a shirt soft from wear tripping into sinks piled with sauce-stained dishes breaking into the scent of boiling water, metal and absence piercing into a train packed with too many people, elbows jostling against too-loud music pounding into a beautiful face mistaken for the moon mistaken for a lover lost bleeding into a line at the supermarket and the lack of recognition at the figure to be paid in a poem written in a lapse of melancholy at twenty-six thrashing against someone held loosely at another age, driving along the coast, recalling nothing in particular.